Office Wars: Applixware and StarOffice

Office suites are the mainstay application for any OS; Linux has two competing for your business.

We humans love glowing boxes. Monitors,
TV sets, suns, moons, lanterns, candles—it all goes back thousands
of years, when we sat around in tribes staring into the fire.
Computers? As long as we're comfortable while staring into the
glowing box, it matters little what exactly we're doing. The light
is comforting, hypnotizing. Still, some crazy person got this idea
that computers ought to have a use, nay, a killer app. Now we're
cursed with spreadsheets, word processors, databases, development
tools, office suites, mathematical packages... Well, Scott McNealy
doesn't want your money (at least not right away), so we might as
well make the best of it.

I must admit, the “warring office suites” cover has an air
of commercialism to it, but it's not far from the truth. At the
same time, it doesn't tell the whole story—Sun and Applix have
their minds on bigger things. It is true that on one level, we have
a price war in a particular market (cross-platform office suites
for Linux/UNIX), but Sun's plans for StarOffice and Applix's ideas
for Applixware are fixed on a less immediate horizon. Before we
look at the offerings of these respective packages, it's worth the
effort to find out where these products are heading.

Sun acquired StarOffice last August and has been giving it
away free of charge. It's not open source, not guaranteed to always
be free, and it is proprietary software replete with generic
licensing nonsense—still, you can now download all 65MB of it
without paying a fee. You can also order it on CD for $10 or $40 if
you want documentation and support. The question is, where is Sun
going with this? A typical cynic might expect Sun to dump
StarOffice on the market, drive out the competition, and then start
charging for the updates—typical rent-seeking behavior. However,
Sun's plan is a bit more visionary. Remember web-based e-mail? Sun
wants a web-based office suite.

StarPortal will be the name of this “portal computing”
office suite, but since it's first-class vaporware, we don't know
how it will be implemented (well, Java). Still, everyone wants to
cash in on the falling cost of bandwidth. StarPortal will have many
obstacles to overcome (stability, security,
accessibility/availability, even the client/server implementation
itself), but at least Sun has the size and capital to pull off this
kind of project as far as it can go, and Sun owns Java.

Applix, not to be left behind, in fact to be in front with
software instead of vaporware, is also expanding into the
thin-client office suite market. Anyware Office, Applix's answer to
the portable office problem, is an 800K Java applet which allows a
user to have office suite access from within any Java environment
(Netscape, IE, JavaOS, etc.). You need to have Applixware on your
home machine, of course, but if you've got this much, you can set
up a home office and contact it from any terminal whenever
necessary. It's quite a clever model, one both Applix and Sun are
pursuing. One difference in strategy is that Sun hopes to have
StarOffice accessible even from PDAs (personal digital assistants
with their half-functional web browsers) while Applix, at least for
now, is staying solidly on the functional web-browser level.

Figure 1. Applixware Screenshot

Another issue is the use of Java. Years ago, when asked for
my opinion of Java, I said it was not a serious language, but only
a distraction, trendy and not worth the effort. Nowadays, Java has
grown in popularity, not entirely on its own merits but because of
C's memory management issues and C++'s tendency to produce
memory-leaking monstrosities (well, low-level languages do expect
you to deal directly with memory). Java has been quite successful
on the Internet and intranets and is enthusiastically supported on
account of its attempt at platform independence. However,
developers must be aware that Java is a proprietary language. The
specification is open: anyone can write Java programs, compilers or
interpreters, but Sun owns the rights. It's probably not a good
idea to become dependent on proprietary languages, and much better
languages are available, but Java is nevertheless where our
Linux-based office suites are headed.

Now we know where these office suites are going, so how do we
choose between them? This assumes, of course, that we are willing
to rely on commercial software. It's mildly difficult to get by
without using commercial wares from time to time, so if you can,
maybe you are a saint, or at least truly
clever. Office suites are often the justification for getting a
computer, and if you've been in school recently, you know exactly
how much of your otherwise pleasant life is spent in front of a
word processor. Likewise, science types may often find themselves
chained to spreadsheets and need to have a fast, stable package
with all the formulas and graphing functions that might come up. In
any event, if you want to use a computer with only one OS on it and
expect to get something done other than hacking, a word processor
is a good idea.

Comments

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I am but a humble novice in the face of all this expertise, but i just wonder if there's going to be a system for the macintosh on the internet for free if not could you possibly point me in the right direction of where i could find one...